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I decided to build a new PC. It’s been over five years since I did my water-cooled rig and technology has made some serious leaps. After weeks of research, the goal is to build a high-end gaming rig in a compact form factor. This rig will be built around having the option to Crossfire or SLI. This will be a combo CLC and air-cooled rig. The CPU will be on a CLC and the video card will be Air Cooled (as of now).

It’s crazy that this build won’t be using a single SATA device! With new PCIe SSD technology, I can finally have the same SSD performance I have been getting on my Mac Pro but now on a PC! Apple was way ahead of the game when it came to PCIe storage technology. Typical SSDs get 500 read / 500 write performance. These PCIe M.2 sticks get 2500 read / 1500 write!

Another big leap in tech I wanted to take advantage of was in graphics cards. I picked the ASUS Radeon R9 NANO because it is the first video card to have it’s RAM on die, called HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), so bandwidth is increased between the RAM and the GPU. And because the RAM is on die, this allows the card to be half the size of it’s equivalent card without HBM!

Keep following my blog these next few days to keep up with my build out!

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It was a lot of work to get all the components in. Trying to find an elegant way to route the water lines was the toughest part. As you can see from the last picture, I have some cable management to work on.

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It took a while for it to all come together. I had a plan several years ago to do the triple-monitor thing. The problem was that it required a lot of third-party hardware. I just never had the nerve to spend that kind of dough to build something that would see occasional use. Times have changed. Hardware has changed. And prices have changed. The planets seemed to be aligned to make this project finally happen:

Here are some crappy videos of my setup in action:

Steam has been cleaning out my wallet with their holiday promos! Some games I recently bought and have been playing since I built this new computer:
DiRT2
F1 2010
Race 07
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Medal of Honor
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Torchlight
Company of Heroes
Metro 2033
Left 4 Dead 2
Just Cause 2